Along with the growing emphasis on men’s ability to utilize anger and fear, masculine emotion was increasingly connected to motherlove in middle-class popular culture in the later nineteenth century. (Girls required less attention because they presumably shared their mothers’ natural emotional endowment and easily followed the maternal model.) A standard popular story, common in boys’ fiction and adult fiction alike, involved men who strayed from home in youth or young adulthood, sometimes causing their mothers great pain in the process, but who retained the fervent image of motherlove throughout their wanderings, only to find how it sustained them and ultimately brought them to redemption. Love, here, was salvation. Even at his most reprobate, the young man retained his mother’s love as “the only humanized portion of my heart. … I shall never be an infidel while I can remember my mother.” Many men wrote to women’s magazines precisely in this vein, carrying fiction into fact: S., for example, recalled how his mother’s love and prayers brought about his religious conversion, bringing salvation quite literally. In a lower key, the same message was transmitted in boys’ stories that referred to mother and prayer in the same breath, as sustained in the face of fear.41
The sublimity of mother’s love was echoed in the growing literature on love between man and woman. In all the advice literature in the later nineteenth century, motherlove contrasted with, although it did not necessarily preclude, sexual attraction. As Eliza Duffey claimed in The Relation of the Sexes, while granting the importance of sexuality, “Is it not possible that there may be a love strong enough and abiding enough, untinged by [sexual] passion, to hold a husband and wife firm and fast in its bonds, and leave them little to desire? I believe it; I know it.” “I believe in marriage all through—the soul, the mind, the heart, and the body, and I would make the last the weakest and least indispensable tie.” And the popular medical adviser Henry Chavesse added: “But while we thus speak of pure and passionate love, we may refer to the animal passion, which in no way is akin to love.” The phrenologist Orson Fowler tried his hand at the same topic, distinguishing love from mere physical attraction. “True love … appertains mainly to … this cohabitation of soul with a soul. … It is this spiritual affinity of the mental masculine and feminine for each other.”42 Religiouslike intensity was love’s hallmark, though proper incorporation of physical expression was allowable. Popularizers disagreed about how openly to acknowledge sex in the equation, but they united in distinguishing love from sex and in highlighting the soulful fervor of love.
Writers addressing women sometimes presented the goals of love with a special gender twist. Because of their sacrificing, maternal propensities, women could more readily live up to the love ideals than men, whose greater carnality was a constant distraction. Again, Eliza Duffey: “Women are not like men in sensual matters. They … do not love lust for lust’s sake. Passion must be accompanied … with the tender graces of kindness and … self-denial or they are quickly disgusted.” “Women … have more of the motherly nature than the conjugal about them.”43 But beneath the agreed-upon focus on a transcendent, essentially spiritual, certainly selfless love, there was disagreement over women’s sexuality among the Victorian popularizers. Stories in the women’s magazines frequently addressed the ennobling power of love, but they did not necessarily distinguish men from women in this emotional area, and they were widely read by both genders. Furthermore, advice literature directed to middle-class men picked up the same focus on fervent, spiritual love. A religious tract noted: “Love is the secret element or power in universal life,” with spiritual love serving as “the bond of wedded souls in heaven.” A few popularizers commented not only on men’s distracting sensuality, which caused men to spoil love by failing to discipline lust, but also on their tendency to lapse from the most fervent devotion after marriage or their failure to show deep feeling in contrast to women’s greater frankness. “Men who feel deeply, show little of their deepest feelings.” But this motif had been common even in the early Victorian decades, and after about 1850, the male control/female fervor theme became too simple. T. S. Arthur noted that men and women loved different objects because of their different natures but claimed that the love itself was equally deep. Love is “the richest treasure of our nature, the most human, and yet the most divine, of our aspirations.” As Frederick Saunders put it, pure and refined love is “unequaled by any other emotion.” “When there is great love, and it is shared by two … every difficulty is cleared away, and concord ends by hoisting its banner over a man’s house”; “love is the strength of strengths.” Arthur himself noted how love perfected both genders through the “mystical and holy” union it provided.44
Love was, for mature Victorian culture, a universal emotional solvent. Properly spiritual, it knew no bounds. It united the otherwise different emotional natures of men and women in deep communion. It constituted one of life’s greatest goals. Here, as Karen Lystra has pointed out, is decisive evidence of the central role of open, intense emotion in Victorian culture. In discussions of love the Victorians built on an eighteenthcentury definition as they castigated not only selfishness but also restraint. The pleasure of love lay in openness, revelation, and, ultimately, the emotional transcendence involved in union with the other. More even than motherlove, this definition of romantic love (and some Victorians disputed the term “romantic” as too prosaic) required no limits. Even publications by previously dour religious groups, like the Pittsburgh Presbyterians, carried love’s banner with poems about couples in a swirling mountaintop fog, “their pale cheeks joined.”45 Love became a panacea.
Grief
Victorian engagement with emotional intensity showed clearly in the embrace of grief. Grief was, in the first place, a vital component in the cultural arsenal. It was frequently discussed, a staple not only of story but also of song. Grief was heartrending, as Paul Rosenblatt has demonstrated.46 The depth of grief followed directly, in fact, from the emphasis on great love, for Victorian convention held that even the temporary absence of a loved one was a real sorrow. As Nathaniel Hawthorne put it in a letter to Sarah Peabody in 1840: “Where thou art not, there it is a sort of death.” Death itself, correspondingly, would move one to the core. Despite its pain, the essence of grief was a vital part of Victorian emotional life. Children were prepared for it by frequent references, while adults developed various conventions to permit its open expression. In its intensity and its link to love, grief indeed could have a bittersweet quality: immensely sad, but almost a welcome part of a full emotional experience. It could express and enrich the very love Victorian culture sought. As a Protestant minister put it in a family advice manual of 1882: “It may truly be said that no home ever reaches its highest blessedness and sweetness of love and its richest fullness of joy till sorrow enters its life in some way.”47
Efforts to present grief and death to children in a benign though sorrowful context continued through the later nineteenth century.48 In McGuffy’s Fourth Eclectic Reader (1866), sixteen of twenty-nine “poetical lessons” dealt with death, including one entitled “What Is Death?”:
Child. Mother, how still the baby lies.
I cannot hear his breath;
I cannot see his laughing eyes;
They tell me this is death.
They say that he again will rise,
More beautiful than now;
That God will bless him in the skies;
O mother, tell me how.
In
